Medium is big and small

forward-backward

stuck in the middle  or
 there is no I in team.  there is a me in team.

 I am me. you are you. we are that.

yes-no 

let go- hold on

push -pull

excite- bore

balance-fall

up- down

This is rather fun. I could go on all day. I want to stop. I want to go on forever. I need to pee. I could probably go hours without peeing. I must do laundry. I could go days and days without doing laundry.

pleasure- pain

joy -fear

elation-boredom

release-work

love-hate

ashtanga-writing about ashtanga

Here I am stuck in the middle with myself!

and yet, am I stuck? No way.  I only know about the middle due to swinging past it between my extremes. Like opposite of how the stillness of a broken watch allows it to be correct twice day, I am in the middle for many moments of every day due to my pendulum of opposites. Thanks  to motion I know what stillness might be.  

man-woman

demon-angel

monster-puppy

fierce- meek

hunger-satiate

famished- gorged

sweet- salt

high-low

hello-goodbye

attention-ignore

give-take

desire-repulse

honor-shame

I am sometimes embarrassed about begin able to give so much of my attention to ashtanga and the Alexander Technique.  Embarrassed because I know the real issue is global warming, world hunger, over population, drinkable !!! drinking water….. 

Suzanne Faulkner- Erin Brockovich

beauty queen-activist BROCKOVICH

I love that Erin Brockovich  is still doing her thing, OUR THING!!! fighting for people's water supplies to be untainted by corporate greed.

I have a terrific handstand. I planted some marigold seeds from my last years marigolds(and some I smuggled home from indian festivals) and they are coming up in my cutting garden. I am looking forward to offering ganesha the prettiest marigold grown from my garden.

justice-just plain terrible

where am I going with this?  no where. perfect.

I sometimes feel foolish about my life as a perpetual gym class.  I love gym. It is the most important class. It is real.  It is not a fake curriculum filled with fluffer-nutter. I love fluffer-nutter.

real-fake

is movement education and the study of the self, is that fake? is it real?  is it in the middle? I am uncomfortable in the middle. I am a middle child and I love it. The middle. Monkey in the middle. Suzy in the middle.

Is it the middle yet?

Go ask Alice. Ask anyone you know who is unwilling to tell you the answer and  there you have it.
Follow the white rabbit. Black dogs are euthanized to a greater degree than any other color dog. black is not a color, it is all of the colors. Or is that white?

mean, media, mode - calculus

life-death

snuggle-cut

body- mind

self-Self

yes-no

no-yes

that's sort of okay……I'd rather die right this second than be terrific with the sort of okay path.  why is the middle path a good place? If the middle is so good why not just hang out quietly and unchallenged right/left in that middle?

maybe because the middle does not really exist as an actual. The middle is the play/work, push/pull of itself.

I am the most selfish person I know, I am also the only person I  know, and  I gave away all of my costume jewelry when I was a little kid because it feels so good to give  people shiny stuff they want.  Know thyself. Help others. The Giving Tree is my biggest nightmare. Is it selfish to continue to give time and energy, thought and avoidance to go in, when what I seem to really value is going out and kicking ass, exposing the bad guy, shutting down the meth lab, disrupting the chain of command…..I want to change the world ,I want to every person to go to bed with food in their belly. I want to be in a quiet room and do ashtanga.

bhakti man/boy is the new cuddle monster

class clown

team kovalam 2013

devoted student 

                             












                                  

what if Iife really is a box of chocolates?  that would suck because really even though I think about chocolate all the time, my best food is peaches.

I got nothing here people.  I am a little starfish. When the shit hits the fan, I am a valuable team member. oh lord!!, I adore the concept of team. every team is a huge play of opposites. for me, team is a more tangible concept than middle.  Team keeps the play of opposites more happening at the same time in an alive, in breath, out breath sort of way. It is not push or pull or push then pull,  push IS pull. the best offense IS a good defense.

When I was a little girl   in the waiting room of my orthopedic surgeon , I sat across from the  then starting kicker for the Philadlephia Eagles. I was a big little kid, solid and tall. He was not a whole lot  bigger than me, he was a regular sized human being.  I love it when a football game comes down to a kick. All of those big huge extra/extra large guys on the sidelines biting the nails of their big huge muscular fingers, while the little guy(in pro football terms) decides it. If I am able, and I am able, to define the middle as a team of different shapes, sizes, strengths, concepts and talents, it is easier for me to see and feel and be okay with  the big and the small, the balance and the teetering, the rajas and the tamas, happening all at once, one after another,  waiting their turn to work together.
I got this middle concept on lock.
middle does not exist alone, yoh (she/he) needs collaboration.

eaves dropping- active listening

DG just pocket dialed me and I listened in for a few moments  even after I realized it was a pocket dial. So  many moments to make moral decisions about. I simply don't have that kind of time.

If I get out of here alive, there is going to be hell to pay.

have a nice day.

fresh drinking water for  those who would not pollute the drinking water of others.

may the force be with you.

ps

force is good.

devotion-defiance
discipline-chaos

devotion-defiance... ashtangi-punk...mighty-mini needs us NOW click on link below
come on Ashtanga Yoga Club Durham! TEAM DURHAM. Please click on link below and donate dollars !!!!!

DONATEtothebhaktiboymovie.comPLEASE     

beg-demand
rich-poor
art-NO art

I love moon days because I don't do ashtanga. I love ashtanga.

dynamic apple at rest on Spruce Street
center city philadelphia

Philadelphia, We Have a Situation.....

did he just say, "again"?

This is  command vessel Apollo 51.4 checking in for her arrival into the ashtanga atmosphere surrounding 733 Sansom Street on Jewelry Row in Center City Philadelphia....UUmmm...everything was going just fine.  

The flight log confirms  a month of consistent practice:  3rd three times a week,  second with some third, just second, and a primary once a week,  with pranyama everyday. There was of course some turbulence, some resistance, but we got the job done.

Last week we noticed our left knee getting more and more incredibly sore and painful, so we eased up a bit on Virinchasana B for a few days. Just as the knee was regaining some of its use and functioning......about 48 hours later...

The left shoulder lost communication with the rest of the ship. There were several days it could bear almost none of its usual load, so without consulting  anyone about anything... we eased up on arm balances. Some of the power has returned to the left shoulder, but it is not  back to its full capacity as of yet.

Got sick for a few days with fever and report general fever related feeling terrible.

the situation.

Perhaps due to the fever, or perhaps due to how fracking hard this mission is in this aging vessel all alone out here in space....there were a few days of shoddy record keeping brought on by shoddy pracitcing and therefore there was very little  in the way of notes to record in the practice log. We seem to have laid off... well... nearly everything.

Today's practice was ten suryanam A's and that was super (fracking) hard. We can happily report a strong central axis but, please note, self report is notoriously unreliable.

DG and me in parsvakonasana
during OBX 5 day mysore event

And that is where we sit and stand upon our pre-flight arrangements for  touchdown into Ashtanga Yoga School of Philadlephia's  Second Series In-depth Study. Wish me luck, love and stamina as I prepare for re-enty into the ashtanga atmoshpere of my teacher David Garriugues.

Faulkner with her husband actual

Tell my husband I love him very much, he knows..

Suzanne Faulkner 

Captain of Apollo 51.4

signing IN

PS
classes continue at
ashtanga yoga club durham
while faulkner is away.

airport yoga

lady liberty and faulkner at JFK airport

Last time I did  yoga in JFK   airport was the year 2000. I was In NYC to practice ashtanga with Pattabhi Jois. it was an amazing trip. When not having an amazing ashtanga time in the Puck Building with Guruji and a few hundred fired up ashtangis, I was biking around NYC shopping and sight seeing. I purchased a little red tank top  with an American flag on it.  I wore the shirt to yoga the next day. I got a space in the front row.  Guruji gave me a ton of adjustments and called me America. When I jumped back  he said "Good America!" It was such an honor to meet Guruji. When I got to the airport my flight was delayed for several hours, so of course I did a primary series and  of course I wore my America T-shirt to keep the spirit of the weekend going strong.

 I am on my way home from 5 weeks studying ashtanga with my teacher David Garrigues in India. It was amazing, intense, exhilarating and exhausting.  We wrapped up the  five week study with a primary series. Then Saturday I packed and ate as many chapatiis as I possibly could and that night I began my journey home.  A rick shaw ride  to the airport to begin the what is turning out to be a three day event.  Trivandrum to Dubia. That was easy! Not to brag, but I upgraded to business class and got my devi ridden 71 pound  luggage checked in with no charge. I slept like a princess on the plane in my  fully reclining seat with my special super thick princess pillows and blankets. The 19 hour layover in Dubai was not such a dream. I purchased a Dubai Transit pass and went and saw some of that crazy city. It sparkles. It shines. Everything is so clean and tidy. After 5 weeks in India it was like being in opposite land. I sat and drank a coffee at a cafe where  men where smoking hukha-like  water pipes. Across the shiny clean orderly highway filled with shiny clean orderly cars being driven by shiny clean people I spy  ONE piece of trash. A white plastic bag in the middle of the pinkest  flower bed  in the world.  I marveled at that piece of trash in that  bright pink flower bed  for a long time and got homesick for India. 

Then a 14 hour flight to JFK. I watched The Matrix. It was so great, that I watched it a second time without sound. Follow the white rabbit.

I  miss a flight to Raleigh-Durham and here I am with a 10 hour layover in NYC. After a rather fantastic crying spree about not making the  flight, I realized that I could get a practice in.  It is great to be back in the USA. I am home, I just need that last detail of a few hundred miles to occur. I put on my little red American flag shirt that I wore for Gurugi and did a lovely primary series in the jet Blue terminal. It was probably not so lovely to look at , but it sure was lovely from the inside. I sit at the gate and wait for my flight. In a few hours I will seem my husband and my chihuahuas. This is turning out to be a fantastic day.

ashtanga is my daddy's football

I am in India studying with my teacher David Garrigues, so I am in a different time zone than my family of origin.

Before leaving for  this nearly 6 week trip to this wild and wonderful adventure called India, I spent a full day with my dad. I cleaned his room, did his laundry, clipped his toenails, ate lunch with him and his pals and watched television with him while my chihuahuas sat on his lap. It was a lovely day. When It was time to leave I could feel the thought that it might be the last time we would be together in a both of us alive kind of way. He was becoming more and more feeble and his heart and lungs were growing weary. I didn't tell him I was going to India, I didn't want to confuse him, I didn't want him to worry.

So I kissed him on the cheek and squeezed his hand and said "Bye bye daddy, see you soon."

This morning at about 5:30 AM Kovalam time I checked my emails before practice. There were many from my husband, I read them first, and then one from my brother. Uh oh....my father died.  "He slipped off with dignity." My brother assured me that his transition was smooth and that it was for the best.   He was ready to go.

neek, me, dad's real pig skin football, jeff, jenn and valerie

Football had been his life's passion. He had been  a great player and an even better coach. He loved the game, those x's and o's  where wired up in his DNA and it  was everywhere in my childhood. He used to tell me that had I been a boy, I would have been an unstoppable halfback. He beamed with pride  when he said this, and so it made me stand tall to think how unstoppable halfback I would have been  in a slightly different form. He did not exclude me from his football, rather he put me in charge of the pre-season stretching drills for his team. There I was  a fifth grader, whistle around my  little girl neck directing the stretching warm-up drills for my daddie's football team. To this day I feel most at home in a big sunny football stadium with the  smell of popcorn and hotdogs, the sounds of bands banging, and cheerleaders jumping and clapping, the vendors selling the home team's colors, and the little kids running around with little tiny footballs.

But this football season was different than all of the others. My brother Jeff had to remind dad when the games where. Sometimes when Jeff  went over to watch a game with my dad  he was watching an animal show or a Turner Classic Movie. We knew he was not long for this world. He was done and so he went.

My brother and sister and her wife were with him as he went. They made plans to get him cremated the next day, and  to have celebration of his life on his upcoming birthday, March 28th. I will be home by then.

the upper darby high school gang
my dad is on the way right

My siblings want me to stay in India and study my yoga. They know that ashtanga is my football. So being a good middle child, I will do as I am told... I will stay here and do my yoga. My father was about 4 hours dead, I am not sure if he died yesterday, today, or tomorrow, the time zone thing is confusing. No matter what the date, I suited up for practice, grabbed my torch (flashlight) for the walk and off I go to yoga.

I don't wanna go

I don't wanna go

the history of IDWG.

A few thousand years ago I took a summer job as an extended school year special education teacher in charge of attending to the individual education plans and goals of six very special teen age students. The  educational, physical (diapers/feeding tubes etc) and emotional  needs of theses students were so extensive that they are not able to take the wonderous summer vacation away from school because they would lose the skills they have had to work so hard to get.  To deliver these educational, physical and emotional services  I was armed with 3 amazing full-time assistants , and a fleet of itinerant staff that delivered intensive services, including but not limited to a: physical therapist,  an occupational therapist, a speech and language therapist, a mobility specialist, a nutrition consultant, and a nurse. This story is dedicated to Corey, one of the students, who is an inspiration to me  during big  transitions.

Corey's qualifications for receiving extended school year services are 

• blindness since birth
• firmly placed all over  the autism spectrum
• mood disorders (temper tantrums) that require an extensive behavior modification plan.
• severe learning disablities that impeded his abilities to make inferences, to grasp the big picture. 

Corey's strengths. 

• He can play the piano like Nat King Cole He loves to play the piano. He looks forward to playing the piano. In fact, he looks forward to playing the piano so very much that even while thinking about playing the piano he is pained with the idea, the reality that any piano time he starts will come to an end. This ending haunts him. He does not want to go!

In a nut shell Corey's strength is his biggest weakness. His relationship with the piano, the music, the prowess, the sensations consume him. This passion, this distraction, pulls him off of most every moment. Even when he is playing the piano he often lapses into a reverie of "I don't wanna go!, I don't wanna go!".

Stages of IDWG

1. The first few "IDWGs" are nearly internal, barely audible whispers. They are paired with an also nearly impercievalbe and yet very distinctive head twist. 
2. "IDWG" becomes louder the head twist is stronger and more frequent. Begins to tap the back of his hand on his chest.
3. "IDWG" becomes louder and the tapping becomes full force hitting with the back of his hand and wrist onto his chest. The head twist becomes stronger to the point that it looks like a chiropcter is invisably cracking his top joint. Head twist becomes body swaying with some random air punches and grabs
4. "IDWG" at the top of his lungs with  thrashing  of body , spitting, grabbing, punching and instead of hitting his chest he bangs  his head with the back of his hand until it bleeds. Head thrashing moves into his entire body.
5. Vocalization stops. Body thrashing becomes  full tazmanian devil dervishing!  It looks like he is wrestling 3 invinsible demons.

"I don't wanna go" 

No fracking joke, he doesn't want to go! He doesn't want to go so very deeply that he is a danger to himself and to everyone around him.

I only worked with Corey for  6 weeks, but in that 6 weeks he taught me a great deal about transitions. I aim to be where I am when I am there. I am right now on my way to India. Big transition right? Oh yes, but no bigger than it needs to be. This morning I saw an American sunrise somewhere over the US flying form Durham NC to Dallas Texas. It was so beautiful. I did not wish it away with wanting to be anywhere else. It was a strangely muted sunset with a turquoise blue beige green yellow pink orange situation going on. The clouds underneath looked like white grey sand with little ghost crab worm holes. Those little white crabs that come out at night, turns out they make holes in the clouds too.

I am not trying to be dick here, I am not trying to down play this trip, but this trip is like all doped up.  I am Lance Armstronging  it.  I am going to India with all of the advantages: many American dollars, my best yoga buddies are already there waiting for me, I have fresh water in my bag, and I have husband at home already missing me. 

I am simply not a nervous traveler. People are talking many languages, wearing bindis, having nose rings. I am already in the minority with my pale skin and blue eyes and I am still here in the US. 

I have wanted to go to India my entire life, and yet I am glad that I am not banging my head in anguish that it is almost over, as I sit here in Dallas . The most lovely little  girl just rolled her fantastic little girl rolling luggage by me. Her smile was to die for. I am in love with her and yet I am fine that... well... that was it for us. That smile, that glimpse of her purple outfit and wonderful well-raised little girl posture as she rolled her perfect  little girl luggage by me was our moment. 

What if it really is all about the real transition,  the final "I Don't Wanna go?"

These tiny transitions we make are merely training for the big show. 

Next time  my mom dies I want to be able to really be there. I want to be able to sit there and be there and spoon her crushed ice when she wants it. I want to be able to sit in silence as she breathes and sort of sleeps and also is alive and smiles at me with her eyes closed and her intellect nearly gone. 

I must practice. I must practice to get ready for the next time my mom dies.... 

I don't want to "I don't want to go" on her next time.  I want to be fully there with her the whole way.  I don't want to be gone in thoughts of wanting and fixing and grasping, I want to be there. I want to be here.

Hi mom. I am going to India today.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Some of the varsity of Ashtanga Yoga Club Durham
celebrating New Year's Day with a Led Primary Series

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy Anne Karenina

All happy ashtanga communities are alike.

faulkner, little man, TIM, neek and antonio
at the barn in charlotsville

Of course these communities are not exactly alike, but they are alike in that they all have many of the attributes that make up our happy ashtanga community.

A space, perhaps beautiful, that makes people feel welcome, even inspired. There is a picture, image or sculpture  of hanuman hung or displayed somewhere in the space.Tim Miller says so!! This space is clean. It is heated in the winter and perhaps there is a little fan or a window open in the summer. Ashtangis only natural enemy is air-conditioning.

David Williams leading us through
Primary Series at Skip and MaryAnn's studio
Silk Hope NC 

A core group of dedicated long term or will be long term type of ashtangis with 4-6 day a week regular practices. This core group of ashtangis welcomes and practices next to the satelitte members of the community.

• once a weekers that have been doing ashtanga forever and are just clinging to that once a week practice.
• the led primary people. where do they come from?
• the sunday morning vinyasa divas in the fancy outfits of hard tail or lululizlemmon boutique level of stunning.
• the newbies that grunt and giggle 
• the visiting ashtangis that are part of another happy ashtanga communitees core group of dedicateders. 
• this holiday season we had many wonderful visitors come practice with us and some of us went and practiced in other  happy studios. It was like a holiday ashtangi exchange program!  

There is a sort of set day or practice, not set in stone, but sort of set, when  the people go out together and eat and/or drink tea and coffee. This sort of set going out is most often for anyone and everyone to join, the one big happy family rule firmly in place.

faulkner and the beaver queen

the Leslies at the Barn during a Lino workshop

There is a massage therapist. Ours in named Patrick Robinson. Each community feels that there massage therapist is THE BEST massage therapist. Even though this amazing, and strong being does not practice ashtanga, he is a part of our community none the less. He loves ashtanga almost as must as we do. He helps keep us from falling off our fiscal, I mean physical cliff.

There is a hair stylist. Ours is named Ray Lingle, and not to brag, but he won the Beaver Pageant in 2011. Once a month he volunteers at the Duke Cancer Center where he cuts patient's hair, helping them get through treatments and growing there hair back after treatments. He cuts and styles their wigs. He also plays piano in the Cancer Center lobby to lighten the spirits of all who listen. He works in an Aveda Salon and therefore we are happy and we have great smelling product too!

Bobbi Misiti and Skip at BeFitYoga
in Harrisburg PA

There is an ambasador. The amabasdor is one of the core group of dedicated practicers and has one of those jobs that takes him or her all over the country and maybe even world. We  are lucky  to have  two official amabassdors. Skip and Dan. They go lots of places and wherever they go, they do ashtanga. It is always wonderful to hear of other communities and know that ashtanga is ashtanga all over the place. We have a budding ambasador named Farnoosh. She shows great promise in spreading the ashtanga happiness all over the wherever she travels to type of personality.

Satelite Communities that are a part of us.  We have a bunch! OBX, Maui, Richmond, Harrisburg, Charlottesville and of course Philadelphia.  We even have tiny satellite communities right here in our area.  Ride the Breath and Ashtanga Yoga Cary are part of us. We are friends and buddies and live close enough to practice at each other's studios. We all share the doctor.

Dr. Dan with the DG during an inspired
second series class at Ashtanga Yoga Club Durham

There is a doctor. This doctor DOES practice ashtanga and IS one of the core group of dedicated long termers. This doctor does not actualy treat the community, but is able to offer advice on where to go and what to worry about and what to not worry about. I once got a sudden and awful case of dizziness while doing ashtanga during a workshop I was hosting.  It was scary and awful and yucky. All of the yogis were like: "Maybe too much coffee, maybe not enough coffee, maybe you are pregnant, maybe its just stress, is it a new moon?...." The doctor pulled me away from the yogis, did a few hand moves in front of my eyes, asked a few questions and told me what he thought it was. He wrote it down and told me to go to my primary physician ASAP and get a second opinion. Our doctor was correct. I was not suffering from a psychic smack-down from practice hard during a full moon, I had benign positional vertigo.

Our community is chock full of doctors. We in fact , of course not to continue to brag, but we have a mulha bandha surgeon. She repairs female's pelvis floors with a robotic suit AND she travels the world teaching other doctors how to use the robotic suit.

We are located within spitting distance of Duke University so we have  perhaps more than our fair share of poetry and cultural studies types of doctors too. Many of these Phd type of doctors are with us for only a few years, but since it is such an intense time in their lives they seem to leave an indelible print on the community and remain a part of it/us even when they go off and seek the glory of the tenure track teaching postion in far away lands.

• Karina of Rutgers
• Janele of Kalamazoo
• Laury of Wisconsin
• Aurelia of Dacian Avenue 

Our current brood of PhD candidates are a very special bunch and it is going to super sad to see them head off into the tenure track, but we know from experience to appreciate them while they are here with us. 

And every once in a great while a community is fortunate enough to have one of these PhDers get the job right here! The Amazing Dr. Towns got the job at University of Chapel Hill. He recently purchased a home right here in our community  conviently located between work and yoga. How sweet is that? We get to keep Dr. Towns! In fact, we christened his new house with an after led primary series New Year's Day Ashtangi Brunch!

So about that quote from Tolstoy's  Anna Karenina. I read the book and  saw the movie. Even though I of course love Anna and her brother, they do skim the cream off the top of life, and they do this as a general rule. This habit of living on the cream is what I think made them unhappy. For me  to be happy I had to learn to give up the impulse of grasping for the cream. To really really get at the ashtanga I must work and play by the rules. Not the rules that are made up, but the real rules. The rules and laws of gravity and nature and food and water and mind and matter. The fun stuff and the passion are fun and passoinate, but they are merely the cream. They are not the contents. Every happy ashtanga community follows the rules. And the rules is, well there is only one rule, and that rule is practice. I strongly suggest you find  a group of people that ascribe to this rule and practice with and amongst them.

with love and gratitude,
Suzanne Faulkner
Head Coach and Varisty Cheerleader
Ashtanga Yoga Club Durham

A.I. gives us a few closing words on the importance of "practice". We know! We know! 

Mind the Struggle

Warning!! 

This a Star Trek: Original Series inspired blog piece

This morning during Mysore practice one of my students was working on Bakasana. There was mention of hovering, of floating, of pressing away form the Earth. Images pertaining to opposing forces lit up my mind.I remember a Star Trek episode where the team beams down onto a planet of miners, digging in the dirt for the benefit of intellectuals dwelling in a city in the clouds. This cloud city  was sustained by some anti-gravity technology that required  a rare mineral that was of course mined by the cave people. This episode The Cloud Minders (3rd season) was classic late 60's social commentary: the uneducated vs. the intellectual, physical labor vs. intellectual energy, poor vs. rich, Etc..The hovering city populated by the fancy people above, and the sweaty grunting cave dwelling Troglodytes on the planets surface below.  

Fancy people
living up in the clouds

Troglodytes
on the
planets
surface

The yogi in Bakasana embodied the internal struggle I am going through to rectify  the play of opposites inside my self. Earth and Heaven, body and mind, sweat and synaptic processing, worker and thinker, school teacher and yogi.

I am struggling with my letting go of my Trogoldyte roots. And yet I do not want to ever let go of my Troglodyte roots. I do not want for one moment to be a Cloud Minder, a better than, a superior. And yet here I sit cross legged at 8:33 AM in my house in a neighborhood that has recently become quite fond of itself. I have a yoga studio upstairs and an Alexander studio in the front room in this nice house in the now fancy location. Me, a 12 year veteran of public school teaching has been awarded the unthinkable luxury of time! Time to write, time to think, time to do  yoga. My dear  friends and former colleagues are at work, in the trenches, teaching  children how to read and write and think, and yet they have no time themselves to read and write and think.. My husband too, is in those same trenches, as I tippy-tap on my little Mac book he is on the front line of  the social inequality war, working for and serving the Hispanic population of Durham NC .He speaks  Spanish and is a translator and interprator, but really he is an advocate for those who have no voice in our school system. He is such a worker bee, and yet in marrying him I have been able to let go of my  full-time job in that public school system and realize a life long dream of being a full-time Alexander Technique teacher. I now have time for my Ashtanga yoga practice and even time for writing about how I feel about having time to write!  

So where is the struggle?

Here is the struggle.....  One of the best things about my Alexander and yoga teaching has always been that I offer the worker bees (myself included in this grouping)  an entry point into the world of self study by being a living example of having a full-time job AND making time for self study. I was a monument, a physical marker to remind my colleagues (and myself) we can partake in the benefits of self study. We belong. 

uh oh.... I am no longer one of them.  I did not hustle off  to the cave at dawn nearly spilling coffee on my made in China Dress Barn  school teacher costume. I worry I am slipping into the realm of the hovering city. I am starting to think I don't really deserve this luxury of time, this reapping of harvest. How have I gotten out of doing lunch duty? Who do I think I am? .... Help I've been assisted into a strong supportive vertical position and I keep hurling myself back to the ground in a heap of something like guilt and somehow shame, with a strong dash of melancholy for the trenches.

Who is the hero?

What is the conflict?

When is time more abundant?

Where is the entry point? 

Why must I see things as black and white , good and evil,  us and them?

How do I define myself now? If I am not the school teacher yogi... who am I?

How is any of this relevant to my yoga practice?

I will tell you.  ... when I figure it out I will tell you.

I have a feeling the relevance boils down to being worthy. I CAN  dwell in the high-faluting city of clouds because my ability to hover is not supplied by the sweat of others. And  I can still be a Troglodyte because I AM that. My ability to dwell in the city of clouds is made possible by the steam rising off my cave dwelling ashtanga yoga doing self. I am the coal miner and the bearer of the  rare and beautiful gems. I am the hero and also the reason the hero must work so damn hard. I am the rising conflict and the resolution. I am what makes the story interesting. I am a complicated force of opposing actions interacting for the greater good. I am the struggle!

What if the struggle is not the problem?  What if the struggle is the answer?

Faulkner on the surface of planet Earth
taking some time to sight see
while in Tel Aviv studying Alexander Technique
I'm so fancy now!!

Ms Faulkner is.....

a) losing a part of her identity to allow for its entirety 

b) missing some details so as to remember the reason

c) Crushing on Mr. Lang

d) Finding her voice

Mr. Spock gets a little action

as does Kirk